More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Alpha packs were born in groups of four or five to their omega mothers, and while each alpha throbbed with barely contained power, none wielded it with such contempt for others as Lock. Lachlan Murphy, really, but it had been Lock since he’d started high school.
he looked like a fallen angel, with his longish dirty blond hair and grey-blue eyes: eyes that danced with mischief. Trouble is, he was the damn devil.
A bronzed hand pushed through the crush of alphas, grabbing my arm and unceremoniously dragging me out. The hand belonged to Cooper Murphy, who usually went by Coop. His green eyes shone with a wild kind of malice,
Seb was Brent’s equivalent, and probably the most sane one of the Murphy pack, but he didn’t look it right now. He stepped in front of all of us, a wall of big, tall muscle
If Lock looked like a fallen angel, Archer looked like an actual one. White-blond hair that tumbled over his broad shoulders, contrasting with his bronzed skin, and pale blue eyes
Lock had been volcanic with rage, but he’d held it back. Archer hadn’t taken his watchful gaze off me the whole night and then, as he’d heard that I’d be moving in with them, his eyes had turned from pale blue to silver. Seb had clenched his jaw. And Coop? I looked at him now, watching him mouth the same words he’d whispered across the dining table as Mum and Adam had brought the dinner in. You’re fucked.
“Everything in me wants to sink my fucking fangs into you and rut you on the damn steps.” “Don’t you fucking dare,” I snarled back.
“Gotta be all quiet and broody-like.” “You’ll probably find a lot more women are receptive to you if you shut the fuck up,” I shot back, earning me a round of cackles from the front seat.
“You’re beautiful when you’re angry, when you’re sad, and even when you’re plotting my no doubt violent murder.”
“You’re my pack’s true mate, Charlie. And that shit they were spouting about your dad? Before you left his place, he made it clear that he was offering your first heat up to the highest bidder. We thought we’d warned everyone else off, but it became clear, once you were starting to ripen, that the Hendersons had made a down payment.
If it wasn’t for your dad, you would’ve been free to study, to go to university and get your degree, to end up with some nice beta guy or whatever. You would’ve forgotten all about us and we’d…” He swallowed hard, gripping my hands tight. “And we’d have learned to live without you.”
“Anyone up for going around to my dad’s and knocking some heads after school?” I asked. “You can ask for whatever sexual service you want to do it, but I’m really hoping you won’t.” “Punching Jimmy York?” Lock said with an evil grin. “Love, that’s a pleasure all in itself.”
“I’m gonna drive out of this town, not get carried out in a body bag.”
“Remember this,” he told me, told himself. “Because it won’t feel like this with anyone else. Only me. Always me.” And that’s when my tears really started to fall. Lock Murphy held me in his arms, kissed his way along the line of my neck, as I cried like a fucking baby, feeling a sense of loss I’d never expected to experience at any time in my life, let alone in his arms.
“We weren’t ready for an omega back then.” Seb shouldered forward, standing just off Archer’s shoulder as he stared down at me. “But we are now. Our deployment is over. We’re getting out of the forces. And Charlie?” His smile was slow and unsettling. “We’re coming for you, love.”
Love and hate are often described as two sides of the same coin and while that is simplistic bullshit (I’ve never loved people who hurt kids for no reason, just hated them), there is some element of truth to it.
Sometimes you meet people when you’re too young and raw and stupid to do anything worthwhile with, but they leave their mark on you regardless, or perhaps it’s because you’re so young. You don’t have the defences, the boundaries to keep people out, and they just smash right into you like a meteorite, leaving emotional craters behind.
“If good sex was all a relationship took, we’d have no problem.” He let out a low grunt, shifting slightly closer at that, his brown eyes turning silver. “But a relationship is so much more than fucking. It’s love and affection. It’s companionship and shared experiences. It’s finding joy in each other’s company.”
Trauma was a buzz word, used to neatly encapsulate all the messy, messy shit that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other, but it didn’t sufficiently describe the width and breadth of that fucking agony.
“Ready to become a human Krispy Kreme donut. Because babes? You’re going into heat. The bros may be back in town, but that doesn’t mean it has to be them that bastes you with their love mayonnaise. You don’t even have to include any guys in the experience. I mean, apparently, you’re gonna wanna take it in every hole over and over—”
“You asking me for a date, soldier?” I asked and as he reached out, I took his hand, happily noting the way his eyes slid all over my body as I jumped off the bed. “I’m asking you for forever, omega,” he said, tucking me in against him. “But right now I’ll settle for the best all-day breakfast place this town has to offer.”
The sweetest of agony, the pain you rush towards not away from, the blade of love cuts both ways if the gods are kind and then you heal from its slice together, only to go back for more.
